The Rambling DBA

This blog post is courtesy of a question I received from Chris Adkin (Twitter) by email. Chris was trying to use Extended Events to track session level wait information, but he had a new twist that I’ve never been asked about before, he wanted to track all of the waits for a specific SQL Agent […]

If you don’t already know it, I love query the plan cache in SQL Server to identify problems that might exist in a server. I’ve blogged a number of ways to use plan cache data to identify and diagnose problems the last few years: Finding what queries in the plan cache use a specific index […]

My latest article on Simple-Talk was published recently. In this article I dig into how to track allocation bitmap contention in tempdb in SQL Server 2012 using Extended Events. The method described in this article redefines how you troubleshoot this type of problem, leveraging the advanced diagnostic capabilities of Extended Events to track the problem. […]

While I was writing about the new features of the Extended Events UI in SQL Server 2012, I realized that I hadn’t written about the TRACK_CAUSALITY session option in the New Session dialog. I thought I was covering everything, but maybe I missed it so I went back and looked at my screenshots and then […]

With the release of SQL Server 2012, one of the big marketing pushes by Microsoft was the new AlwaysOn features that were a part of the release. However, as a part of this push, a lot of confusion has occurred where articles, blogs, tweets, and forum posts refer to AlwaysOn as if it were a […]